Britain’s bid to clear its huge backlog of asylum claims has seen so many people allowed to stay it effectively amounts to an amnesty, a parliamentary investigation found yesterday.
British Prime Minister David Cameron’s government took office in May last year vowing to sort out the giant backlog in asylum cases.
Immigration is a sensitive topic in Britain, regularly featuring high in opinion polls of voter concerns.
About 403,500 cases of the 450,000 in the backlog have been concluded, with 38,000 people (9 percent) having had their claims rejected and been removed from Britain.
However, 161,000 (40 percent) of the cases concluded by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) led to the asylum seeker being allowed to stay.
This is “such a large proportion that it amounts in effect to an amnesty” said the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, a scrutiny panel of lawmakers.
About 74,500 asylum seekers had their cases concluded simply because “the applicants cannot be found and it is unknown whether they are in the UK, have left the country or are dead.”
“The net result is that a very large number of people remain in the UK who either have no right to be here or who would have been removed had their cases been dealt with in a timely manner,” the committee said.
To clear the backlog, officials were allowed to consider granting leave to remain to applicants who had been in Britain for six to eight years, as opposed to 10 to 12 years previously.
And in one in six cases, the UKBA has been completely unable to find out what had happened to the applicant, the committee said.
“We consider this indefensible ... Moreover, public confidence in immigration controls is severely undermined by such situations,” it said.
British Minister of State for Immigration Damian Green insisted there was “absolutely no amnesty” for asylum seekers.
“The asylum system we inherited was chaotic,” he said, with some cases dating back more than a decade.
“The main thing is we’ve now eliminated this backlog from the system so we can now get on with the everyday job that the previous government couldn’t because they had that backlog,” he said.
In a keynote speech on immigration in April, Cameron said Britain had seen its largest-ever population influx under the Labour governments of former British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Net immigration was at 2.2 million between 1997 and 2009.
He vowed to root out abuse of the system and get Britain’s borders “under control” to take immigration off the agenda.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS